Dear David, Thank you for highlighting the fact that this “competition” was really a test on how to please Arne Duncan by parroting his ideas.

I had a similar thought when I saw Ezra Klein’s weird hero worship of Duncan.

I looked into Duncan’s track record and I was not impressed. If his school system managed to dramatically outperform all others I can see giving him free rein to demand change he wanted. But so far he has not shown himself to be the guy with the answers.

San Diego Schools Zig on Reforms While Obama Zags ;at least one place doesn’t believe in blackmail.

Education is like art: everyone is a critic. The headlines I have seen use the language “failing schools” to “win big” with Duncan’s dollars. Glad to see failure rewarded.

I don’t believe we have the kind of “comparative effectiveness research”

We have this. It clearly indicates the major factor is Class Size. aka: More Teachers.

My late husband’s twin nieces both are NYC educators. I have talked extensively with both about education, especially since my son was not educatible. He went to every kind of school that ever there was.

Some of the experimental schools work; some don’t. A lot of the issues surrounding what does & doesn’t work in elementary & secondary education involves cream-skimming, or attracting those students &/or parents who pour enough energy into it to make it work regardless of resources.

That is the private school Manhattan model.

However, that model is not scalable, i.e., it cannot be used as a systemic approach, because it relies on skimming the best off the system.

Arne Duncan’s ideas had no positive effect on Chicago where he first tried them out.

Arne has never taught a class to the best of my knowledge.

Arne’s plan kills 5% of our schools based on false idea that poor student performance is solely due to poor teachers.

Arne is tall, plays basketball with Obama, taught Obama how to speak in Ebonics (Arne’s preferred language), so we are stuck with a no child left behind testing and test teaching and teaching to the test and lowering passing scores so as to get the school to pass and not get a penalty system that Arne refuses to junk. Meanwhile teachers are now “surplus” across the US. Teacher unions are not much help as they force us to pay twice the salary needed to teachers whose only qualification for such a salary is survival to date. School Administrators are worse as they are the home for jobs for incompetent favorites of politicians – and for over-staffing that kills the funding for the teachers we actually need. As usual, Obama plans no major change.

I suspect Duncan is among the ‘true believers’ crowd who don’t evaluate evidence as to what works and what doesn’t.

As I said at 5, everyone’s a critic. So let’s remove unions (Arnie’s plan) and pay teachers half what their pay is now (Papau’s scheme). Not the way to encourage folks to enter the field of education. Sad to see unions disparaged in comments on FDL.

I distinctly recall how I benefited from early, then high school education.

Incentives; generally participation and peer pressure. As a student, you had to maintain your GPA to participate in other school sponsored activities like sports or drama or whatever. No pay (grades) no play (other activities).

And standards were high – no such thing as grading on a curve. Factual knowledge was absolute.

That system, largely, is still in play in India, China and Russia. My dear russki Yelena is revered in her immigrant community here, because she passed through the equivalent of high school in the 100% class – meaning she never missed one question on finals. Maybe 2% of Russian kids accomplish that, and are held in high esteem.

Here, we game athletes grades so they can even STAY in school – through COLLEGE!

Or, how about paying teachers what the market would bear if outcomes (not tests, but rather student achievements) were important. Of course, student achievements are not measurable (thanks be to god for those for whom test scores rule), and there is no easy way to adjust for cream skimming, so Duncan will rule!

So far, I don’t see where Arne Duncan is any big improvement over Bush. He and Obama both love No School Board Left Standing.

Too many ways to game the system, which the other countries haven’t figured out yet.

Eli is upstairs!
It’s Not Just Health Care

I remember the hearty laugh a math instructor gave a board member at our community college who was critical of math scores. His concern: Half the students were below average.

I hope we can be honest about what this actually represents: blackmail.

What you talking????

If we are going to pay teachers “what the market will bear,” a tiny few of them will become tutors to the rich, and the rest will seek employment elsewhere. The only way education will ever be associated with equity will be through vast public subsidy, and the current Duncan-led drive to privatize the public schools will further exacerbate the inequity of American life.

Blackmail? He has the gold makes the rules.

Right: But correct to: the Duncan led drive to “corporatize” the public schools.

Nice point.

Response to VOBE, (not Sid):

It’s our gold, dude.

Right you are: golden rule.

I am a teacher, active in teacher union affairs, and Arne Duncan gives me pain in the butt. He has never taught (too elite to teach), he claims to have run the Chicago school system (yeah, right!), and he says he knows how to improve education in the whole country (I guess he is going to wave his magic wand and give every kid a good, prosperous home). According to Mr. Basketball, the only thing standing between low-performing students and success is a bunch of bad teachers. So he wants to dangle some dollars in front of teachers in the hope they will play the whore and play his game–and call it success. And the teachers unions are ga-ga over this guy because he has given them a “place at the table.” The only result that the teachers unions can expect from dining with Arne is complicity in screwing their rank and file. I may be a liberal, but I find myself longing for the days of Margaret Spellings. She may have been a conservative, but she was not a phony. Arne is the proverbial three dollar bill.

It’s our gold and we’re going to blackmail state educators into taking it from us, I guess.

“will further exacerbate the inequity of American life.”

I think that’s their goal

another decade down the road and the general american will be even dumber and even more like a lemming to be herded by the corporations, as serfs

http://www.susanohanian.org/outrage_fetch.php?id=664

Funding and investment is of course the major policy issue in education, I believe – the US remains a place where it is still considered heretical to use public money directly in a not-for-profit manner that benefits working people and their children.

Beyond that, however, is a really troubling anti-intellectual mass-consumer society that seeks instant gratification, that idolizes private wealth, throw-away material possessions, and glittering celebrity status, above all else. The education system here may actually be good fundamentally, and it could be that the society of people no longer tries to engage with such a system. Who cares how to build the boob tube you are watching O’Reilly rant on so long as you can get it cheap, etc. It could be that, furthermore, the 24-hour economy that is killing the ability of individuals and families to do much more than work is at issue. Minors will not normally succeed in education much at all without parents pushing them and encouraging them to do so heavily. That isn’t too feasible if both parents are working 50 or more hours a week.

The point is that the broad population no longer has a cultural life that requires an education or even encourages one, the mass consumer society tends to reduce us to a bunch of chimps pushing buttons to receive genetically altered bananas, and besides individuals and families are becoming more and more subject to the ever-increasing demands of our employers and an economic system in which our wages are shriveling.

This is probably the reality underpinning the “problems with the education system”; while it needs work – lots of financial and cultural investment – the education system is probably in better working order for education than most of the families that are relying on it.

To educate our kids, who are also us.

From my standpoint, Duncan is yet another blue blood in the Harvard Administration that currently exists in the White House. It arguably insane if not just plain obnoxious to put an Ivy League private school elitist in charge of a system he has never personally had to participate in or get to know. You’d think Obama would understand that somebody who is actually a product of the public education system might have sufficient connection to its mission and importance to help drive needed reforms.

The Obama does not care.

“Listen, and understand. That corporatist is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever! Until you are dead.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKbZMIP4XUE

and I hope that we remember that our kids are ours to educate and that responsibility for their education is only shared by schools.

I’m still trying to figure out how offering additional funding to school systems willing to try the Race to the Top model is blackmail.

Beyond that, however, is a really troubling anti-intellectual mass-consumer society that seeks instant gratification, that idolizes private wealth, throw-away material possessions, and glittering celebrity status, above all else.

See Guy Debord’s Society Of The Spectacle

The point is that the broad population no longer has a cultural life that requires an education or even encourages one, the mass consumer society tends to reduce us to a bunch of chimps pushing buttons to receive genetically altered bananas, and besides individuals and families are becoming more and more subject to the ever-increasing demands of our employers and an economic system in which our wages are shriveling.

Expect at some point that when the mass society is finally thrown out by an elite which no longer needs its labor-power, there will be a broad resurgence in interest in education for brute survival, somewhat along the lines of the South Central Farmers. Yeah, that’s right, urban farming. Grow a crop, eat it, continue to exist.

I remember a few years back seeing a local news report on a charter school that had the best standardized test scores in the state. All kinds of local and state politicians were weighing in on how this charter school had done so much better than the other schools in LA Unified. But they said right in the report that it was a charter school for gifted students. If you get to set up a school specifically for gifted students, who, by definition, test well, shouldn’t you expect to get the best standardized test scores? Apparently I was the only one that thought it made them all look stupid to be hailing this great accomplishment.

When I was working as a school counselor, I went to a big training where they were saying that if you had the socioeconomic data on the neighborhood, you could predict the test scores of the schools in that neighborhood with pretty darned good accuracy, better than any other criteria. So obviously, rich people are smarter and we should have a contest to give out prizes to the rich people!

I know a lot of parents in my very conservative area who are very upset with the Duncan system. They are asking how on earth they can make it a prize to a few states instead of dividing that money up when all the states are suffering. Don’t we all pay our taxes? Don’t all our kids deserve to keep their teachers? I think some prize money could have been okay, but that kind of big money to only a few states has not gone over well, even among the charter schools are great crowd.

It’s that the race to the top model is not based on evidence of what improves schools. It is blackmail to try pretty drastic things that have not been proven to work. Things that schools would not do and parents would not support. But if you don’t, you lose your teachers and your school to budget cuts. I’m not sure blackmail is accurate, probably too strong, but the essence is accurate. How on earth does firing the entire teaching staff and only rehiring no more than half of them back if you rehire any make for a better education? There is no analysis of why the school is failing. Another option is to close the school and farm the kids out to other schools. Do you know how hard it is for parents to get their kids to school and home afterward without missing work even when the schools are close to their homes? And what is the reason for it? It’s all punishment based with no link to how the punishment accomplishes anything.

The thing that really offends me came out in the recent RI firings. Even if a school has actually met its improvement goals it could still be subject to punishment for being in the bottom 5%. Even if it is the most improved, it could be shut down and/or the teachers fired. You can’t perform miracles on kids who show up in your classroom already years behind, so the measurement of the teacher is how much improvement there has been since the child was in their classroom, not if they are still low performing. Another thing that is crazy is that they compare the school as a whole across years, not the actual students. I worked at a school with a poor population, migrant workers and those who had to move a lot because of losing housing. They had some excellent teachers who did excellent work and made a huge difference, but their NCLB statistics didn’t show it because the next year, if not before a year was out, those kids were gone and they had a new crop that they had never worked with before. A richer school I worked at actually did not do as well with the kids it had, but was in better standing with NCLB and even got a distinguished school award at one point. The moms were stay at home and spent a lot of time volunteering in the classroom and working with their kids at home so the teachers could get away with not doing as good a job. So why should they get bonuses while the other teachers get fired?

I will also recommend Susan Ohanian and her outstanding book “Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Schools?

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0325006377/susanohaniano-20

for a well-researched look into how the Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce, and the conservative foundations took hold of America’s schools and started shaking the money out of their pockets and introduced the “crisis” in American schools. The rhetoric they created is thick within and without RTTT and the Obama Education Department. Arne Duncan is one of their main stooges.

And for those who want a good debunking of the manipulated research and what is really going on I suggest the late, great Jerry Bracey’s “The Bracey Report on Public Education: 2009″. Dr. Bracey was a curmudgeonly critic of all the educational fads, a columnist for the Phi Delta Kappan for years, and a well-respected psychologist who worked for the Educational Testing Service.

http://epicpolicy.org/files/BRACEY-2009.pdf

Here in Florida, the Jeb Bush run “Foundation for Florida’s Future”

http://www.foundationforfloridasfuture.org/

is behind a series of draconian, anti-union, anti-teacher, anti-public school legislation that is flying through the state legislature. He is partnered with the CoC of Florida and a couple of other corporate organizations, he has a grudge against the Florida Education Association for thwarting his attempts to privatize public education during his governorship, and he quotes Obama and Duncan admiringly.

In fact, the signature “reform” legislation that just passed the FL senate, SB6, was largely written using Duncan’s Race to the Top language and it’s a conservative corporate lackey’s wet dream — punish teachers and destroy their unions, create a merit pay system that has no basis in research and doesn’t even actually exist, and funnel lots of money to private charter schools and corporate scholarships and away from public schools.

The National Core Standards, another Obama work of, well not art, is a corporate dream come true also — 100+ years in the making. If these groups are successful then public education will finally be destroyed in the United States, replace by private, for-profit, selective, segregated, faith-friendly charter and private schools. Follow the money. Always follow the money.

And with friends like Arne Duncan one does wonder exactly what an enemy is nowadays. Obama campaigned on repealing the hideous No Child Left Behind and has now strengthened the worst parts and left the rest largely unchanged. Duncan is either so stupid or so crafty he is still spouting about how NCLB is a piece of crap that needs to be scrapped all while reinforcing and making worse the nastiest parts of the law.

Florida is being used as a test case nationally by conservatives, neoliberals, and coporatists to see if they can finally, once and for all, destroy the teachers unions and end public education as we know it so it can be opened up to profit taking and manipulation. They have nearly succeeded, with Obama and Duncan’s help and may yet reach their goal. The timing is perfect with states going under with their budgets and education being the largest expenditure in all 50 states.

Pray for us teachers and pray for students across America — the corporate wolves are at the door and bashing it down!

Late to the discussion, but I fail to see the difference from wanting universal health care to also stipulating there should be basic universal educational standards. I don’t like NCLB because it paves the way for vouchers. But that does not mean a child in Oregon should not be expected to have acquired the same basic fund of knowledge and skills as a child in Mississippi or Maine by the same grade level. Texas, of curse, I mean course, is a different matter as the study of ignorance is now a well-founded major.

I’m heartened here in CA by the protests that have taken place in response to budget cuts. People still want a good education for their kids and they aren’t all buying that corporate intervention will get it for them. They like their teachers and don’t think they are paid enough, for the most part.

Another thing that bothers me about the “reform” movement is that it assumes that teachers are bad or good due to motivation alone. That just isn’t the case. If these idiots had actually taught, they would know that a lot of it is skill. There are, I’m sure, teachers who just don’t care, but for the most part even the ones who aren’t doing well want to do well. Why not put programs in place to teach them better? It’s like telling me that you’ll give me a huge bonus if I translate something into Russian but you’ll shoot me in the head if I don’t. I will be motivated even more than teachers are by money and firing, but all the motivation in the world won’t make it happen since I don’t speak Russian. People assume they teach teachers how to teach in college, but their programs are not standardized, nor is there agreement on what good teaching entails. So why punish the teachers if the problem is a need for skills, not motivation?

NCLB and the Duncan system don’t have national standards. They can’t touch that without getting the Texans up in arms, so each state gets to set its standards and there’s a lot of evidence they are gaming the system. But who wouldn’t with so much at stake? If you incentivize gaming the system over anything else, that’s what you’ll get. See, e.g., Wall Street.

Read Jerry Bracey’s commentary on “common standards” in the link I provided above. I have no problem with common standards either, if they are developed with the stakeholders and are usable, sensible, and reflect what Americans actually want students to learn.

The National Governor’s Association wrote these standards with representatives of the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the Gates Foundation, and several other political think tanks. There were no teachers involved. The professional organizations who have been studying and writing standards for decades were excluded as well — no International Reading Association, no National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, no National Council of Teachers of English. All teachers and professional organizations were invited to “comment” after the standards were already written by the corporations and think tanks.

If one becomes aware of the history of public education in America one will see how slimy this whole operation really is. Read Diane Ravitch’s latest book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education” – she worked in the Bush administration’s Ed Dept. and played a large role in NCLB. She has since recanted and exposed the whole operation as the corrupt, public-school destroying operation it really is.

Paula, one of the requirements to apply for Race to the Top funds was agreement to adopt the new national Common Core Standards produced by the National Governor’s Association and their corporate and neoliberal think tank pals at the urging of Obama and Duncan. Texas and Alaska have opted out but the other 48 are already on board.

My only point was that seniority pay with pay for extra degrees has some very poor but long in job teachers making $100,000 while others are in the $25,000 to $60,000 area depending on the area of the country.

Teachers are best evaluated by other teachers – not student scores – but pay should follow evaluation and not be locked down to check offs on a to do list. I am aware of the prior pay by sleeping with the evaluator, or being a relative or friend of the evaluator, problems prior to unions – but there has to be a better way than the current union contracts.

I agree with you and so do the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association. Both unions have worked hand in hand with districts to explore better ways of evaluating and compensating teachers that are more fair and less subjective than the current system. One of the requirements of applying for the RTTT funds was agreement between the school boards and the unions to work together on this issue. Kentucky and Wisconsin are 2 states that have pioneered peer evaluation with the backing of the unions and that the Obama administration sees as innovative and promising.

That was one reason Delaware and Tennessee both won the RTTT grants — both had union backing and a plan in place to work together. Georgia has no unions. Florida has collective bargaining units that can negotiate wages and working conditions (to some extent) but it is a Right to Work state that outlaws walkouts, strikes, and other union actions, effectively favoring management at all stages. Georgia came in 3rd and Florida came in 4th in the RTTT competition.

Part of Florida’s rejection was based on the fact that out of the around 65 collective bargaining units around the state, only 5 signed on to the grant application. The FDLE (dept. of education) excluded the union from the entire process and they lost because of that, so Duncan isn’t totally evil, LOL. The current reform in Florida bases 50% or more of a teachers salary on a single test score only and the authors of the bill made it clear that there would be no exceptions made for students who are excessively absent, disruptive, have special needs, or anything else. Zero tolerance for excuses and we’ve seen how ineffective zero tolerance policies are with student behaviors.

You just can’t use black and white approaches to working with human beings because there are too many grey areas and a need for tolerance of difference, something that Obama and Duncan seem reluctant to admit since their corporate masters don’t allow for it in widget making and profit taking.

Well, I think that was the point I was making that NCLB is a well-conceived plan for undermining public education, i.e., encouraging vouchers. I have not read her book, but have heard her interviewed on NPR, and largely agree with my understanding of what she is saying. However, that does not mean that testing is not an integral part of the process.

I am not sure teachers are the best source for determining what children should learn; they are an invaluable source in establishing how children learn. Now, I also acknowledge that how children learn is often predicated on what they have learned. If you don’t know how to conjugate a verb, its pretty difficult to write an essay.

As for testing, once one has identified the array of facts and knowledge that is reasonable to have expected a child to learn, constructing a test to reliably and validly measure whether a child had learned what they should have learned is really quite easy. Will it measure all of the important aspects of the educational process and skills. No. But you know, a well-constructed multiple choice test can do a pretty good job at measuring critical thinking skills.

Has anyone done research or ever experimented with a group of teachers who move for example to three different schools within one year…or three different schools within 3 years. Each school would have different socioeconomic factors, etc. If a teacher raised scores in the “higher” socioeconomic areas for example, but not in the lower areas, maybe other factors besides the teachers abilities are in question.

If Charter schools are supposedly the solution, then why not model some of the public schools after the best ones? Where is the “proof” that they are better?

Actually Duncan did just that in Chicago. He fired the “bad” teachers and brought in “good” teachers to replace them. After 3 years the test scores remained the same or got slightly worse.

As to charter schools, the latest research shows that they do about the same as public schools when they have the same population to work with. Washington DC just released their annual report on charter schools and the charters actually averaged a little lower than the regular schools, despite the fact that they are seen as the holy grail in that city and receive tremendous amounts of aid and support.

And aardvark, any psychometrician will tell you that designing reliable, accurate tests that are affordable and fairly easy to administer is an extremely difficult proposition. Measuring critical thinking skills is time consuming and difficult to grade. Multiple choice simply tests knowledge of facts, memory, and recall.

And teachers, along with parents and community members should all be a part of the discussion about what children should be learning in school. Teachers not only know how students learn but also what is developmentally appropriate for them to learn. That’s why many educators are laughing at the book recommendations in the new core standards. Plato in 4th grade. And elementary level novels in high school. But that’s what you get when you let people with no expertise or knowledge make important educational decisions, isn’t it?

Rather than “blackmail,” “extortion” might be closer in our modern usage. But I see in the wikip article for blackmail that the term was originally used for protection rackets —which I think we now call extortion!

This dance marathon prize or whatever it is Duncan is giving out to starving school districts sounds a bit like a protection racket, except that in this case if you come across you might get as a reward what you need (and what could better be shared among all), instead of getting as a punishment what you don’t need.

If I really wanted to be ugly I would accuse Duncan of stretching out in an Eames chair somewhere saying to himself, “Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

I think California as a whole is going to reject this Top Down approach to Education seeing as we’ve seen this movie before. We once had some of the best schools in the nation and we didn’t largely without Federal interference.

I welcome Federal Aid when it makes sense for everybody involved, this nonsense makes no sense as Arne has not been called on the mat for his lack of knowledge around education as a whole and his track record in Chicago doesn’t stand on its own merit.

We need to continue to expose those in the Obama Administration who are wholly owned by Wall St. and the Financial Sector. Banking should NOT be 60% of the economy that is today, that’s utter nonsense.

Thanks for the correction. I was thinking they were under the NCLB for standards. I really hate how standardized testing has dumbed down what the schools are teaching. But at least I am capable of teaching my kids broader thinking and analysis skills. What happens to those kids who don’t have that advantage at home? I was lucky enough to be a product of the old CA school system, but not all were.

I recently read an article about efforts to figure out what good teaching consists of and if those skills can be taught. I looked for a link, but couldn’t find it. They did talk about some research that identified teachers who were able to do well with students who generally did not do well so it would be more likely attributable to the teacher than student factors. What they were arguing is that it is a combination of skills the teacher uses to work with the kids and keep their attention plus having the kind of subject area knowledge that allows them to understand where a child is going wrong in the learning process and how to correct that, which is not the same as good subject area knowledge for other purposes. You need to not only be good at math, but good at deconstructing the common errors kids make when they are learning math.

There have been some successes in teaching both attention keeping and subject area skills, but I didn’t get the impression that the programs people have set up have been proven to create better teachers. It would at least make sense if mandatory attendance at one of those programs were involved instead of mandatory mass firings. There is a lot of evidence that whatever makes for a good teacher, there aren’t enough of them in the system. Firing what you have and hiring new ones isn’t likely to get you good teachers. There aren’t enough good ones out there and the good ones aren’t likely to want to teach at a school that is in the bottom 5%. It’s harder to teach kids who are not up to grade level in the first place. Add to that the threat of being fired because you are in a target school and with a board that chooses the mass firings option and why would good teachers sign up for that?

Paula T agree—education starts in the home. When children go to school intellectually bankrupt their problems are compounded by the educational system. Children who have home experiences as you did learn in spite of the problems with the school system. That is why Head Start,MHOO, was a huge failure, as they took the children from the home to try to catch them up. The parents were the ones who needed the training and motivation to help their children. When parents are left out of the equation—little progress can be made.

Not everyone in Delaware is happy about getting this award. For several years a coprporate-dominated group called Vision 2015 has been trying to get the state legislature to pony up with $100 million to fund their schemes of privatization. With the Rodel and Broad Foundations (Eli Broad, ex-honcho at the Notorious AIG), Chamber of Commerce, et al writing the application, they have now got the Feds to dictate their takover. For more about the backstory and how Delawareans feel, see Who Pays the Piper at the Broken Turtle Blog.

there’s a lot of evidence they are gaming the system. But who wouldn’t with so much at stake?

I’d be interested in seeing a statistical comparison of K-12 proficiency prior to the creation of the Dept of Education.

I did read one many years ago that compared the reading, math and history proficiency of kids that came out of rural, one room, land grant schools with their grandchildren’s proficiencies (and the spending per head difference between the two models was specified in factorial notation.

But I’ve lost that resource.

I’m amazed that no one ever comes up with the most obvious solution to our education conundrum: We need to PAY TEACHERS MORE. Until teaching is on a competitive pay scale with other professions that draw our nation’s finest, we will never have our nation’s finest teaching. Don’t we want our best educated doing the educating? How many Harvard grads are teaching in the inner-city? Not a lot. In Los Angeles, you are probably twenty times more likely to find a Cal State grad than someone from a very competitive university.

900 billion on weapons, and 30 billion on education. We have the best weapons…